Key Takeaways:
- Outdoor Retailer’s Minneapolis debut centered brand discovery, with the Garage Grown Gear and Founded Outdoors Pavilion drawing steady crowds of buyers and founders throughout the show.
- More than 150 creators took part in the Wild Reach Initiative, generating live content and bringing a new kind of energy to the show floor.
- Retailers and emerging brands alike described finding real, unexpected connections on the floor, with several brands leaving with promised orders after just half a day.
I have been going to Outdoor Retailer for more than a decade, through boom years during the first stint in Salt Lake City and in some cases, Denver, and through the leaner years that followed. I have watched this show get big, get bloated, get criticized, shrink, get upended by COVID, and scramble to find its footing since.
The show in Minneapolis this week was the first Outdoor Retailer show in several years where I felt the industry actually let go of the past.
I did not hear people comparing the floor to what OR used to be. People seemed to show up, understand what it is now, and engage with it on those terms.
Full disclosure: Shop Eat Surf Outdoor and Outdoor Retailer share the same parent company, which means I am not a neutral observer here. But I have had a front row seat to watching the OR team try to rebuild and reimagine this show over the past few years, including Senior Vice President Lindsay Hubley, who has come up with a steady stream of creative ideas, built new relationships and worked to repair old ones across the outdoor world.
She has approached the rebuild with a scrappy, entrepreneurial mindset that is not always easy to execute inside a large corporation. We have a companion interview with Hubley about the OR rebuilding strategy here.
A busy Outdoor Retailer on Day One of the show. Photo by Tim Aukshunas, courtesy of Outdoor Retailer.
Wes Allen of Sunlight Sports Weighs In
I talked to Wes Allen, Owner of Sunlight Sports in Cody, Wyoming, on the show floor, and he had had a similar reaction in the first few hours of the show. Allen is an influential voice in the outdoor specialty retail world.
“First initial thought is, there’s palpable energy,” Allen said. “There’s a lot of people walking around. It’s a good-looking show, and there’s energy. Kudos to Emerald (Outdoor Retailer’s parent company).”
Allen said his store had already written its major preseason orders, which freed him up to treat OR as a discovery trip.
“This show is easy to get to. It’s got a bunch of brands that we don’t know, so it’s really exploratory for us,” Allen said. “Newness is really a key component of the whole business, and we can find some newness here.”
Other shows offer new brand components, like Discovery Marketplace, which takes place over a few hours at the GOA Connect Show, Allen said.
“This gives me a little bit more time to walk around and talk to people,” Allen said. “If I can walk away with three new partners that make my store interesting, that would be a roaring success. And we’ve already seen one or two things that would really fit well into the shop.”
Allen pointed to a past example of the importance of finding new brands: a freeze-dried backpacking food brand called Bighorn Mountain Foods, which he found at a small show rather than a major national show, is now a strong seller at his store.
“Now two years in, we’re making real money off of them, and people are coming into the store asking for it,” Allen said. “You know, the upside to coming to a show like this is you might walk this thing and find something like a Bighorn Foods.”
Wes Allen, owner of Sunlight Sports in Wyoming, and daughter, Sahale. Photo by SESO.
A Show Rebuilt Around Discovery
The clearest theme of OR 2026 was brand discovery. The show’s new small brand pavilion, officially the Garage Grown Gear and Founded Outdoors Campsite Pavilion, sat in a prime spot on the floor rather than tucked in a back corner, and it was packed from the first morning.
I talked with Lloyd Vogel, founder of Garage Grown Gear, an ecommerce site focused primarily on ultralight backpacking gear from smaller brands, about why he got involved in Outdoor Retailer this year.
“It just felt like Outdoor Retailer was doing this reimagining of what it was going to be, and with (the show) being based in Minneapolis and us being based in the Twin Cities, it just felt like there was an opportunity in their reconfiguring of what this was going to be to really put small brands at the center of it,” Vogel said. “It felt like they needed us and we needed them. They needed something that was new, different, fresh, and we wanted to get our brands onto a national stage. It felt like a pretty win-win scenario.”
Vogel credited Hubley for identifying where the show’s new energy needed to come from.
“She’s been really amenable to wanting to figure out how to infuse new life and meaning into the show, and it felt like that wasn’t going to be through having all of the legacy big brands here,” he said. “I think she quickly identified that it’s going to be from small and emerging brands. They’re eager, but they need to be wrangled and corralled, and Garage Grown Gear is at the epicenter of a lot of these brands. So, it was a pretty logical partnership.”
Garage Grown Gear and Founded Outdoors together represent roughly 600 small outdoor brands, according to Vogel, giving the pavilion a real bench of founders to draw from.
Personally, what struck me most, having covered plenty of new-brand areas at other trade shows over the years, was how alive this one felt, and how well executed the brand presentations were in such tiny spaces.
Vogel pointed to the format itself as part of why this one worked.
“Our brands have a three-by-three space (3 foot by 3 foot), so that either gives you the ability to have a really crummy setup, or for you to be really creative within a small space,” Vogel said. “It’s really awesome to see our brands take that space and just say, we can own this. Because you have founders in these spaces, and the layout at OR is very casual. You get to flow through it. It’s not a traditional aisle where you can just ignore people. You are flowing through a space that facilitates conversations really nicely.”
Lloyd Vogel of Garage Grown Gear who worked with OR to create the Garage Grown Gear + Founded Outdoors Campsite Pavilion for small brands at the show. Photo by SESO.
Vogel also pointed to a distinction he saw as central to the pavilion’s energy: talking to founders rather than sales reps.
“Nothing against sales reps, but you’re not talking to reps here. You’re not talking to people on their second week of work,” Vogel said. “You’re talking to people who have poured their everything into these companies, and this is the manifestation of their hard work. And they’re all standing amongst each other.
“Minnesota really showed up for this show,” Vogel said. “We don’t get a lot of stuff here. To have an industry event in Minneapolis is awesome. There’s a real rallying call. There’s also some aspect of no one wanting OR to die in Minneapolis. We don’t want it to come to our state and have that battle. We want it to be successful.
“If this is something that can keep its momentum, we’ll be excited. I hope they’re back in Minneapolis next year,” he said. “It’s got the buyers, and where buyers go, brands will eventually go.”
Retailers Hunting for Newness
Mitch Mode, who owns Mel’s Trading Post in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, has been coming to OR off and on for 20 years, through its biggest years and its most uncertain ones.
“I would say initially, half day into it, now very much worthwhile,” Mode said. “What I’m looking for here is small, unique brands, which I’m finding at this show. In the old days, Denver, Salt Lake, you’d find them all in the hallways and everything else. Small ones are what set me apart. Everybody has the big names. I want the small, unique brands that the guy down the street does not have. So far, half a day in, this show is fulfilling that.”
Mode said he had three buyers at the show also looking at new brands, and they would compare notes later.
“This show is a very small, regional focus. A lot of Minnesota manufacturers out here. I think the buyer base is predominantly Midwest. Maybe that works, maybe it doesn’t,” Mode said. “But five, six years ago, when OR was in Salt Lake and Denver, huge shows, everybody assumed those would continue to work. They didn’t. It’s an evolving industry.”
Mitch Mode, owner of Mel’s Trading Post in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. Photo by SESO.
Drennan Hicks, second-generation co-owner of The Trail House in Frederick, Maryland, took over the store from his parents in 2020 with his wife. Their first and only prior OR experience, in 2021, left them cold.
“We went to the first show post-COVID, which I think was like ’21, and we didn’t really find it incredibly helpful,” Hicks said. “We were new to the industry, didn’t really know what we were doing, we were totally overwhelmed by it.”
This year was different. Hicks said the show’s focus on small and emerging brands was what pulled The Trail House back to OR after a multi-year absence, and he spent his first two hours simply walking the discovery pavilion.
“I could talk to 30 brands that I never would have had the chance to talk to otherwise,” Hicks said.
Hicks also said he made connections with several small brands at the show, and he even connected with one that he already carries but was previously bought through a distributor. He found out the brand is based less than an hour from The Trail House, without either side knowing it.
“We formed the relationship and the connection now, and that is going to help a lot,” he said.
For Hicks, finding new brands is not a side interest. It is core to how a store the size of The Trail House, about 2,500 square feet and located near the Appalachian Trail, competes at all.
“It’s a differentiator from us from the big box and REIs and our competitors. We can be a little more agile and get the smaller new stuff,” Hicks said. “We try to have something new that no one has seen before, a couple new brands every year. Especially around holidays, our goal is to have two or three things that no one has seen before in the store, that are smaller, easy holiday gifts.”
Asked whether he’d come back next year, Hicks said it depends on the show staying true to this year’s focus.
“If they continue this trend of the emerging brands and giving them a space, absolutely,” Hicks said. “I don’t know if we’ll get to the point where I’m bringing all four of our buyers, and that level may take a couple of years to get to. But it’s worth it for one of us to come out, see what’s going on, and form some new relationships.”
Drennan Hicks, second-generation co-owner of The Trail House in Frederick, Maryland. Photo by SESO.
Brands Finding Their Footing
At the Garage Grown Gear + Founded Outdoors Campsite Pavilion, the founders I talked to described a similar dynamic: real conversations, real interest, and in some cases, real orders forming within hours of the show opening.
Krista Eickmann, founder of The PStyle, a product that helps women urinate standing up in the outdoors, has been running her business for 20 years and described a complicated history with the outdoor industry’s trade show circuit.
Early on, she said, cold-calling outdoor stores as a woman selling a product built around a topic the industry did not want to discuss was often a discouraging experience, and she shifted her focus toward queer and feminist communities instead. Eickmann said her brand sells through Garage Grown Gear and is also part of the Founded Outdoors community, and that connection made this show accessible in a way it had not been before.
“Garage Grown Gear made this small brand area available to us. Normally it would be way too expensive for me to consider coming,” Eickmann said. She described the show so far as energizing, saying she had spent much of it talking with women, queer, and non-binary attendees genuinely excited about the product, along with a handful of retail buyers who told her they planned to carry it.
“I can’t imagine that it won’t be beneficial for us to have been here. It’s already been beneficial,” she said.
The PStyle product. Photo by SESO.
Jackson Janke, who works at Chicken Tramper Ultralight Gear, said the show marked the brand’s first full official trade show after selling through a handful of retailers directly.
“We basically got involved because the pricing was an option we could afford,” he said. “We didn’t want to spend a ton of money on a huge booth, and this was a great stepping stone in meeting a bunch of buyers and connecting with other like-minded people and creators.”
By midday, he said the brand had already had meetings that promised orders.
“It was a little slow to start, but then everyone started flooding in, and we started connection after connection. It’s been a great experience so far.”
Jackson Janke and Austin Gongos of Chicken Tramper, which makes ultralight gear. The brand made the most of a 3-foot-by-3-foot display. Photo by SESO.
Content Creators Bring a Different Kind of Energy
The other unmistakable shift on the floor this year was the presence of content creators, part of OR’s Wild Reach Initiative, powered by Popfly. More than 150 creators took part, and the energy they brought was distinct from anything I have seen at this show before.
Many of them had no history with OR and no baggage about what the show used to be. They were not jaded. They were excited to be there, talking to brands and learning more about the products.
Content creators getting set up at the Popfly booth before hitting the floor. Photo by SESO.
In addition to the Wild Reach Initiative, Garage Grown Gear brought in a YouTube creator with 1.2 million subscribers to livestream interviews with six founders from the small brand pavilion.
“We’re bringing 35 to 40 brands here. We want this to be successful, so we can throw a little bit of our weight behind it,” Vogel said about why he asked the YouTuber to the show.
Walking the floor of the show, you could see content creators talking to brands about their products and making content constantly, while podcasters and streamers discussed the show and talked with brands as well.
A YouTube live stream on the show floor. Photo by SESO.
A Legacy Brand’s Cautious Optimism
Not every voice at OR 2026 belonged to a small or emerging brand. Neil Fiske, President of Black Diamond Equipment, which was not an exhibitor, participated as a panelist on Industry Day, the day before the show opened.
“I thought it was a good, positive step forward for the industry. Meaningful and constructive dialogue on key issues and how we can come together to build the industry,” Fiske said about Industry Day. “We need time like this where we are not solely focused on selling the next season but looking out over a longer time horizon for the benefit of all stakeholders, brands, retailers, and most of all consumers.
“We’d love to see this August show build into something bigger, and we’re very open to playing a bigger role,” he said. “But we’d like to see the industry align better on the overall approach to trade shows — when, how many, and for what purpose.”
